Huffines Institute Director's Blog

A specific blog from me is a rarity recently because we have so many talented young scientists that have been providing thoughtful points on a wide-variety of topics - plus, all of our podcasts and videos keep us busy. You certainly don't need more clogging up your inbox.

Starting today, Twitter has a new resident: the Cool Science of the Day twitter feed (@CoolScienceOTD). This feed is a joint production of the Huffines Institute and a group of highly motivated, really smart doctoral students at Texas A&M University. This twitter feed aims to highlight the really exciting, adventuresome, and impactful science that is being done in today’s world. Too many times, science in today’s media and social settings is characterized as boring, overly complex, and not ...

Then there are the weeks in sports where you think: “How can this stuff really happen? Are people really this maniacal and self-serving?” Unfortunately, there are times when your naivety is stripped and it really appears that even decisions about appropriate health-care for athletes are decided by incompetent idiots on power trips. Two extensive investigative reports this week dealing with the health of football athletes show convincingly that unfortunately, this incompetence, greed, and po...

One of our goals at the Huffines Institute is to encourage activity. But we also encourage common sense when you exercise. I don’t know if it is the time of the year (spring), a lack of proper guidance by society, or just youthful beliefs of invincibility, but the general lack of concern for their own basic safety that I’ve seen exhibited recently by runners, pedestrians, or bicyclists gives me pause.

Science always brings us new facts that challenge us and challenge our perceptions of the world. For example, over the past five years, we have begun to see research into a type of compound, produced by the body, that is probably responsible for what we know as the ‘runner’s high’. Most of us know that the ‘runner’s high’ is the euphoric feeling that occurs when you run, but it also occurs when you do any task that is physiologically difficult. Linked with the runner’s high are a wide a...

For those of you that have written wondering where your podcasts have been, thanks for missing us (for those that didn't miss us, well...thanks for knowing we exist!). As you can tell, we are back today, starting our weekly podcasts up again. I had at least one wag who suggested that we were still partying from our 100th podcast, and while that would have been fun, unfortunately that wasn't the case.

I’ve purposively not touched the Lance Armstrong story because it is so tragic on so many levels. While there has always been a lot of ‘smoke’ (allegations), there never has been the amount of evidence that was released a week ago by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA – link to the report). If you are at all interested in this story, I would encourage you to read USADA’s report. If you had any reasonable doubt about Armstrong’s actions, this document will remove those doubts.

For many of us in Aggieland, fall really starts tomorrow (Saturday, Sept. 8) with the start of A&M football. Tomorrow’s game is historic in many ways – most them having been commented on over the past 14 months since A&M decided to move to the SEC. But it continues to fascinate me that football, in so many ways, is an integral part of our lives. (Remember, I wrote the blog about why we get so upset when our team loses – I seem to be fixated on this topic, eh?) Football is used as a placemar...

A shrinking majority of us remember the phrase “Live or Memorex?” from an audio tape commercial where when used, the sound from these tapes was touted as being as good as live…(here’s one of the more famous of those commercials). More and more, given all of the instant sources of information we have access to, we are facing the same decision that we did back in the 70’s with our audio tape: do you look for ‘live results’ or wait for ‘the tape’? This decision really has come to a point ...

Most everyone knows the Olympics are starting today and try as I might, I always get sucked in by the Olympics. Every time the Olympics come around, I make a resolution that I’m not going to spend all my time watching the Olympics. Now you might imagine that in my business that would be difficult to do, but I try really hard to hold on to that resolution. I tell myself that I’m not really interested in many of the sports or that I’m cynical about the doping at...